From The Archives

What Drove Dominick Dunne’s Quest for Justice

From the November 2009 issue, Vanity Fair digital director Mike Hogan reflected on the long life and many acts of Dominick Dunne, who, for decades, chronicled the particularly American strain of justice, from the Kennedys to O.J., for the magazine.

Dominick Dunne at Vanity Fair’s Cannes Film Festival party at the Hôtel du Cap, 2001., Photograph by Antoine LeGrand.

Left, By Jilian Edelstein; right, By Mark Seliger.

Nobody ever saw Dominick Dunne and wondered, “Is that who I think it is?” You knew right away. The Turnbull & Asser ensembles in Crayola hues, the circular tortoiseshell glasses, the aroma of talcum powder that preceded him by five paces. It was all by design. He wanted you to recognize him. He wanted you to introduce yourself. He wanted you to tell him what you knew.

“He always used to say that people told him things, and they did,” says Betty Prashker, Dominick’s longtime editor at Crown, “and not just the people he was sitting next to at a dinner party, but the waiters who were handing him the food and the butlers who were taking his coat and hat.”

“When you were with him at a restaurant, he always seemed a little disappointed if no one came over,” says his friend Cynthia McFadden, of ABC News, “but he didn’t have to suffer that kind of disappointment often.”

“He was our pop star,” says *Vanity Fair’*s Reinaldo Herrera. “I suppose it was his Hollywood training. He certainly knew how to become a star, and he did.”

There is a reason it has become customary to compare Dominick Dunne to Truman Capote, whose career he consciously emulated. Both writers emerged from obscurity to play outsize roles in the social lives of America’s upper classes. Both used their insecurities to their advantage, exposing the offhand ways in which social arbiters dispense with pretenders. And both were at their best when writing about crime, revealing, from very different angles, the visceral horror of murder and the mundane inhumanity of the criminal-justice system.

But Dominick had something Capote did not: a life-defining cause. Justice wasn’t just a plot device to him; it was his passion. Again and again, he’d watched as wealthy, well-connected people got away with murder—sometimes literally—and he never learned to accept it. “What drove Dominick was that sense of outrage,” says *Vanity Fair’*s Marie Brenner. “He was furious.”

“Nick kicked people who were on top,” says the writer Jesse Kornbluth, “and to do that and have it published is not small. And then to be celebrated for it!”

What makes his accomplishments all the more astonishing is how low he was just three decades ago. Before he became one of the most instantly recognizable magazine writers in the world, Dominick Dunne’s only claim to fame was his epic, humiliating failure. His charmed life as a Hollywood producer, party giver, and collector of A-list friends, from Gary Cooper and Jennifer Jones to Natalie Wood and Dennis Hopper, had been undone in spectacular fashion by his insecurity, addiction, and indiscretion. “He was really a mess,” says his friend Brigid Berlin, the Andy Warhol insider. “If anybody was at the bottom, Dominick was.”

How he climbed back to the top is one of the great turnaround stories of the celebrity age. “What got him in trouble in Hollywood was his big mouth, getting hammered and telling stories out of school,” says his elder son, Griffin Dunne. “And what made him popular was telling the same stories and people wanting to have the stories told about them.”

Even when he was nobody, Dominick knew everybody. The author Jane Stanton Hitchcock met him in New York in 1982, at a dinner party hosted by Bobo Legendre, whose family, the Sanfords, are said to have been the model for the aristocratic Setons in the 1938 movie Holiday, starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Dominick had just arrived from Los Angeles, his wounds still fresh. “He did not have a dime,” Hitchcock says. “He’d had this whole Hollywood life, but he was struggling.”

According to Griffin Dunne, then a promising actor with a starring role in An American Werewolf in London, Dominick’s vast social network extended all the way from the dinner-party circuit to the gutter. “I’d have lunch with him, and all these street hustlers and vagrants would go, ‘Hey, Dominick,’” Griffin recalls. “This is a guy who based his life on Cecil Beaton. Now he’s Damon Runyon. I said, ‘How do you know these people?’ And he goes, ‘Oh, you know, they’re from the rooms.’ He’d become a star speaker at various A.A. rooms in the Village.”

It’s not hard to imagine Dominick honing his repertoire of self-lacerating stories at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, but he wasn’t afraid to tell them in polite company, either. Those who knew him eventually heard them all.

With reporters after Martha Stewart’s sentencing, New York, 2004.

By Jessica Craig Martin.

He was born into a well-to-do Irish-Catholic family in Hartford, Connecticut, at a time when being Irish was still a social handicap. His father, a prominent heart surgeon, called him a sissy, beat him with a wooden hanger, and never accepted him—until he came home from World War II with a Bronze Star for rescuing two fellow soldiers from behind enemy lines. After the war he married a beautiful Arizona ranching heiress named Lenny Griffin, moved to New York City, and found work as the stage manager of the Howdy Doodyshow. But his lifelong fascination with movie stars soon propelled him to Los Angeles.

There he and Lenny became known for their extravagant parties, which were attended by the cream of Hollywood: Kirk Douglas, Jane Fonda, Billy Wilder, Merle Oberon, Roddy McDowall, Lauren Bacall, and so on. These affairs produced some world-class scrapbooks, but they took a toll on the Dunnes’ marriage, not to mention on their children, Griffin, Alex, and Dominique. “If it was a particularly noisy or rowdy night,” Griffin remembers, “we’d get bundled up in our pj’s and checked into a hotel with our little schoolbags for school the next day.”

Perhaps worse, from Dominick’s perspective, he was never really accepted by these new friends. As a TV producer socializing with movie stars, he didn’t rank. Frank Sinatra told him to his face that he was a no-talent hack. Others just said it behind his back.

On an English train, 1962. From the personal archives of Dominick Dunne.

Even the crowning triumph of the Dunnes’ Hollywood life ended with a sour twist. In 1964, Dominick and Lenny celebrated their 10th anniversary with a lavish black-and-white ball at their home on Walden Drive, in Beverly Hills. “Le tout Hollywood was there, and my eyes were falling on the floor,” says Mart Crowley, whose play The Boys in the Band was later adapted for the screen with Dominick as co-executive producer. Among the guests were Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Alfred and Betsy Bloomingdale, Billy and Audrey Wilder, David Niven, Angela Lansbury, Loretta Young, Natalie Wood, Vincente Minnelli, and Truman Capote, who was photographed for Vogue dancing with Tuesday Weld.

Two years later, Capote gave his famous black-and-white ball in New York and neglected to invite the Dunnes. The snub infuriated Dominick, but he had more in common with Capote than he realized. Not long after Dominick arrived in Hollywood, he attended a party thrown by the producer William Frye. “I had all the old movie people that were still alive,” Frye recalls, including Joan Fontaine, Rosalind Russell, and Bette Davis. A week later, the Dunnes invited Russell and Davis to a party at their house, and they didn’t invite Frye. As Dominick wrote in his memoir, The Way We Lived Then, “I used to say that I was good at writing assholes because I used to be one.”

Lenny divorced Dominick in 1965. After that he went into a downward spiral. He was arrested for possession of marijuana following a flight back from Mexico and was paraded through the airport, handcuffed, past his brother John Gregory Dunne and sister-in-law Joan Didion, two of the literary celebrities of their day. He torpedoed his producing career, he always claimed, by making a tasteless joke—later printed word for word in The Hollywood Reporter—about the powerful and popular agent Sue Mengers and her husband. Mengers responds, “I was flattered that Nick Dunne would identify me as the person who ended his career in Hollywood because of my power. I wish it were true.”

Realizing that his Hollywood life was over, Dominick left town, drove north, and wound up in a cabin in the Cascade Mountains of Oregon, where he stayed for six months. He contemplated suicide, but resolved instead to sober up. It occurred to him that he would be a writer. He was 50 years old.

Back in Los Angeles, he sold almost everything he owned, including his West Highland terrier. “I paid $400 for Alfie,” remembers Connie Wald. Then he moved to New York, where he rented a tiny apartment on Ninth Street and focused on finishing his first novel, The Winners, which he’d sold as the sequel to the gossip columnist Joyce Haber’s novel The Users. He must have thought the worst was behind him, but it was about to come.

With his daughter, Dominique. From the personal archives of Dominick Dunne.

George Hamilton still remembers what it was like in 1982 inside the intensive-care unit at Cedars-Sinai hospital, in Los Angeles. “There was no time or light,” says the actor, whose 52-year-old half-brother, Bill, was terminally ill. “I would be there sometimes for 20 hours at a time.” He was keeping vigil when an ambulance arrived carrying Dominick Dunne’s daughter, Dominique, a 22-year-old actress who had just appeared in Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist.

Dominique had been strangled almost to death by her 26-year-old boyfriend, John Sweeney, a sous-chef at the L.A. hot spot Ma Maison. Dominick awoke in the middle of the night to a phone call from Lenny, and he boarded the next plane to Los Angeles. The family, re-united by tragedy, convened at Lenny’s house, on Crescent Drive, then headed to the hospital. “At first I did not realize that the person on the bed was Dominique,” Dominick later wrote. “Her neck was purpled and swollen; vividly visible on it were the marks of the massive hands of the man who had strangled her. It was nearly impossible to look at her, but also impossible to look away.” Tests showed that Dominique was brain-dead, so the family, while still struggling to come to grips with this nightmare, gave consent for her to be taken off life support. Before his daughter was wheeled away for the last time, Dominick leaned over, gave her a kiss, and whispered, “Give me your talent.”

Her killer’s trial was a travesty. The judge was a preening attention seeker, Dominick later wrote, who wore “designer jeans, glossy white loafers, and no necktie beneath his judicial robes,” and who seemed to go out of his way to accommodate the defendant, whose history of violence against women was not revealed to the jury. The Dunnes attended every session on the advice of victims’-rights activists, who told them, “It’s the last business of your daughter’s life.” The judge, meanwhile, issued a Draconian set of restrictions at the defense attorney’s request: “If any member of the Dunne family cries, cries out, rolls his eyes, exclaims in any way, he will be asked to leave the courtroom.”

Dominick sat there and absorbed it all. Later, he would say he had never given “five seconds’ thought” to the criminal-justice system until that trial. Now he found himself helpless to protect his family from a second tragedy. Only after the jury delivered its verdict—manslaughter, which meant that Sweeney would be back on the street within three years—did he finally erupt. After the judge thanked the jury on behalf of the attorneys and both families, Dominick shouted, “Not for our family!” Griffin remembers the moment: “He’s being pulled out of the court by the bailiffs and met by the reporters, who had their cameras ready. That’s when he found his voice.” Dominick’s article about John Sweeney’s case was published in the March 1984 issue of Vanity Fair under the title “Justice.” Even today, you can feel the rage pulsating behind his carefully chosen words.

By the time I met Dominick, in 1998, he had channeled that anger into a world-class writing career. He and his editor—my new boss at the time, Wayne Lawson—had been working together for 15 years, producing definitive coverage of the most notorious, and irresistible, criminal trials of the 80s and 90s. The world they introduced me to bore no relation to anything I had experienced before. My last big adventure had been a somewhat disappointing year abroad, studying Anglo-Irish literature at University College Dublin. There I decided that I wanted to work with real live writers, instead of spending my life figuring out what James Joyce had had for breakfast the day he wrote page 236 of Finnegans Wake. Wayne worked with some of the magazine’s best, and my job, as his assistant, was to make the reporting and editing process as painless as possible for them.

I did what I could, though no one ever accused me of being the concierge type. Dominick inscribed a copy of his book Justice to me with the words “To Michael Hogan, who saves my life every day,” but he wasn’t always so charitable. I’ll never forget how furious he was the day he called me from Wilmington, Delaware, where he was reporting a story about a drug-addicted DuPont heir whose prostitute girlfriend had wound up dead, stuffed inside an air-conditioning duct. I had been sloppy and booked him in a middlebrow hotel in the wrong part of town. “Do you know who I am?” he screamed. “I’m a star at this fucking magazine!”

But he was also capable of great kindness. His words of encouragement meant a lot to a 24-year-old scholarship kid who was struggling to get his bearings in the sophisticated atmosphere of Vanity Fair. And he could be funny. Once, Wayne took us to a fancy restaurant where on a previous visit I had spotted a tiny worm inching its way across my hamburger bun. When we arrived, the maître d’ said it would be a few moments and motioned us to one side. Waiting for tables was not Dominick’s thing, and after two or three minutes he could bear it no longer. Whipping out one of his signature green, leather-bound, personalized Smythson of Bond Street reporter’s notebooks, he said in a very loud voice, “So, tell me about the worm you found on your hamburger the last time you ate here!” Within seconds we were seated.

Maybe Dominick was destined to become a star, and maybe Vanity Fair was destined to become the magazine it is today, but neither outcome seemed especially likely in the spring of 1985. The magazine had debuted just two years earlier and was still struggling to find its footing. Every week, it seemed, the papers ran another item predicting its demise. Being underestimated had its advantages, though, starting with the camaraderie it fostered among the small staff. “We were on a mission,” Marie Brenner remembers. “And Dominick was the missionary. It was as if he was creating himself for the first time. He had the esprit of a kid, even though he was old enough to be everybody’s uncle.”

He wrote at a feverish clip, contributing to issue after issue—profiles of Diane Keaton, Gloria Vanderbilt, and Candy Spelling, as well as a dispatch from the trial of the man who killed Vicki Morgan, the ex-mistress of merchandising tycoon Alfred Bloomingdale.

Then came the sensational re-trial of Danish-born aristocrat Claus von Bülow. Two years in a row, in 1979 and 1980, his rich American wife, known as Sunny, had fallen into a coma during Christmas celebrations at the family mansion in Newport, Rhode Island. The first coma passed, but the second would hold her in its grip until her death 28 years later, in December 2008. In 1982, Claus was convicted of attempted murder and sentenced to 30 years, but the well-known defense attorney Alan Dershowitz won him his freedom on appeal.

Von Bülow’s second trial began in Providence in April 1985, and Dominick was there, covering it in a way that would have appalled the hoary heads of journalism. He became a guardian figure to Sunny’s children from her first marriage, Prince Alexander von Auersperg and Princess Annie-Laurie “Ala” von Auersperg, and never wasted a moment worrying about objectivity. “I took sides,” he wrote on vanityfair.com after Sunny’s death. “I believed Ala and Alex. I disbelieved Claus von Bülow.”

Dunne on location in Italy with Elizabeth Taylor, 1973. By Gianni Bozzacchi/from the personal archives of Dominick Dunne.

But he was enough of a reporter to know exactly what to ask Claus and his girlfriend, Andrea Reynolds, when the opportunity presented itself. Reynolds, who later befriended Dominick and called him her “best enemy,” says she and von Bülow had been warned not to speak to him, but an incident at the hotel in Providence where they were all staying softened her resistance.

“One evening I’m walking up the stairs to my apartment and what do I see? I see Dominick Dunne stuck between two floors in one of those old-fashioned metal elevators,” Reynolds says. “Some people had gone to get help, so I lay down on the steps, and I took hold of his hand and tried to soothe him. My heart went out to him. So when he was saved, I said to Claus, ‘You know, we’re being unfair to this man. Let’s give him the interview.’ And Claus never really disagreed with me; he didn’t dare.”

On this occasion, at least, von Bülow would live to regret that policy. Dominick posed the two questions every other reporter had been too polite to ask: Did Claus ever really love Sunny (“Oh, yes”), and was it true that Andrea wore Sunny’s jewelry? Andrea’s reply—“Not true! I have far better jewels than Sunny von Bülow ever had”—wasn’t likely to win her any fans in the cheap seats.

There was enough in Dominick’s article to cause a stir, but what put it over the top were Helmut Newton’s morbidly fascinating photographs of von Bülow and Reynolds in matching leather jackets that made them look, as Reynolds puts it, like “S&M people.”

“That in itself was total trickery,” says Reynolds, who claims that she and von Bülow had received the jackets as gag gifts from their respective children. (Hers had the words hell’s granny stitched on the back in silver lettering.) She also claims that the leather shots were done as a favor to Newton, who promised not to publish them.

Dominick phoned Marie Brenner, ecstatic with the news. “The phone call that I remember is: ‘You’re not going to believe this. We have gotten Claus to pose in a black leather jacket,’” she says. “That picture went around the world.”

The August 1985 issue, with Claus von Bülow and Andrea Reynolds on the cover, set a new sales record for Vanity Fair. If the magazine had helped turn Dominick’s life around, it was no less true that he had been instrumental in saving the life of the magazine.

There was just one problem with the von Bülow trial: Claus was found not guilty. The verdict came down on June 10. “The courtroom was strangely mute despite a few cheers from elderly Clausettes in the back of the room,” Dominick deadpanned.

For the next few years, he mostly stayed out of court. At Vanity Fair, he flitted from topic to topic, as most magazine writers do: Imelda Marcos, the Duchess of Windsor, Robert Mapplethorpe. It was interesting and glamorous work, but some who knew Dominick doubt that he found it altogether fulfilling. “He could talk the society stuff very well, but I don’t think that’s what he was really dancing to,” says George Hamilton. “I think his heart was wrapped around the loss of that child and that tragedy.”

Then, in 1990, a story broke in Los Angeles that was almost too ghastly to believe. Two wealthy, handsome young brothers, Lyle and Erik Menendez, were arrested for murdering their parents at their home in Beverly Hills. They hadn’t just murdered them, however. They had massacred them in the family living room, with shotguns, blasting their father in the head, their mother in the face, chest, arms, and legs, and then both in the kneecaps in a clumsy effort to cast suspicion on the Mafia.

Dominick took up residence at the Chateau Marmont and spent six months covering the trial. Rhode Island had been one thing, but now he was back in Los Angeles, where he had gone off the rails, suffered his disgrace, and watched John Sweeney win a slap on the wrist. How good it would feel to get even. He threw himself into covering the trial, bluffing his way into the Menendez home, which was for sale at a heavily discounted price, and trading insults with Erik’s defense attorney Leslie Abramson, who happened to be a close friend of Dominick’s brother John Gregory Dunne. (John later dedicated a book to Abramson, at which point Dominick stopped talking to him for more than six years.)

Simon Brennan, who fact-checked Dominick’s dispatches from the trial for Vanity Fair, sensed that he was having a hard time finding a way into the story. There were no grieving family members to side with. Jose and Kitty were dead, and their children were the killers. Still, his coverage of the trial was notable in at least one respect: outraged by the defense’s central claim, that Jose had sexually molested the boys, and that this somehow justified their actions, Dominick wrote for the first time about his own experience of abuse. “I was not abused sexually, but physically and psychologically. I was beaten with straps, hangers, and riding crops,” he wrote. “But I never wanted to kill [my father]. The thought never once entered my mind.”

In a London taxi, 2008.

By Jason Bell.

On June 17, 1994, Orenthal James Simpson and his sidekick Al Cowlings hit the road in a white Bronco, sparking the highest-rated low-speed car chase in television history. Five days earlier, Simpson’s ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend Ron Goldman had been the fatal victims of an ultra-violent knife attack at her condominium in Brentwood. O.J., who had previously pleaded no contest to charges of spousal battery against Nicole, was the prime suspect.

The whole country paid attention, but Los Angeles was downright transfixed. O. J. Simpson wasn’t just a retired football star—he was one of the nation’s most charismatic African-American celebrities, as famous for his product endorsements and roles in films such as Roots and The Naked Gun as he was for his record-shattering 2,000-yard season as an N.F.L. running back with the Buffalo Bills.

The case painted a giant red stripe down the city’s racial divide: white people, for the most part, thought O.J. was quite obviously guilty; African-Americans, remembering the Scottsboro Boys, Hurricane Carter, and countless other black men falsely convicted in crimes against whites, suspected the continuation of an old, sinister pattern. Jeffrey Toobin wrote extensively about the case’s racial implications for The New Yorker, but he doesn’t remember discussing them with Dominick. “I think that was to him a case about a murder and victims,” he says, “not a case about the racial climate in Los Angeles.”

Dominick became obsessed with the ensuing murder trial. “He went almost insane,” says Griffin Dunne. “It was like a disembowelment for him, with everything that happened with Dominique. It was just churning up every ugly memory.”

“O.J. has taken over my life,” Dominick wrote in a May 1995 article in V.F. titled “All O.J., All the Time,” which began with a dizzying description of his daily routine, starting at six a.m., “when room service brings me my o.j. and coffee,” continuing through a review of the day’s O.J. news, culminating with a long session in court where “we all stare at O.J. to see what kind of mood he’s in or to which lawyer he’s talking,” and ending at a dinner party where “they all wanted to talk about nothing but O. J. Simpson.”

The trial represented everything Dominick had come to despise about the legal system as it applied to rich and famous defendants. One defense attorney dedicated to smearing the victim was bad enough, as he saw it, but O.J. shelled out millions of dollars on a “Dream Team,” including F. Lee Bailey, Robert Shapiro, Alan Dershowitz, Robert Kardashian, and Johnnie Cochran, of whom Dominick wrote, “Personally, I have never liked brown, pale-blue, or mustard-colored suits, or ties with horizontal stripes, but when he wears them, they work.”

Dominick was alive to the surreal glamour of what soon became known as “the trial of the century,” but he was also dead serious about the outcome he desired. He befriended the victims’ families, particularly Ron Goldman’s father and sister, and wrote movingly of their ordeal. He wanted a guilty verdict as badly as they did.

As always, he met people who told him things. “At first there was some skepticism,” remembers Cynthia McFadden, who covered the trial for ABC. “I mean, how could he possibly just run into all these people? But it was just simply the fact.”

All his life he had been a repository of tips, information, and gossip, but never before had his morsels been so highly prized. “L.A. was obsessed with the O.J. case, and Dominick was their point person,” says Dan Abrams, who was covering the trial for Court TV. “He wasn’t writing just about the trial. He was writing about the spectacle. And part of the reason he could write about the spectacle is because he had this unique access.”

Dominick’s lifetime of aggressive, peripatetic socializing was paying off in a big way. “I sometimes thought he got unfair criticism about name-dropping,” Toobin says, “because that was his life, and the information that came from that life was interesting and relevant. Dominick would have lunch with Nancy Reagan the way I would take my son to one of his soccer games. One of those things is journalistically relevant and the other is not.”

Those who weren’t privy to both sides of him—the party guest and the courtroom sleuth—might not have realized how hard he was working. “I don’t know when he slept,” says McFadden. “He literally was out every single night, and he was the first person in the courtroom every morning.”

Vanity Fair published nine of his O. J. Simpson dispatches over the course of 1995. In that pre-Internet media landscape, Dominick’s reports were the only ones that, in Toobin’s words, “tore down the curtain between what journalists say to each other at lunch and what they put in their stories.” If you cared about the O.J. case, and almost everybody did, you had to read them.

Dominick became a constant presence on television news programs, from Nightline to Larry King Live. It was the dawn of the 24-hour-news era, and America, with no wars to worry about, was endlessly fascinated by the courtroom travails of its domestic villains. He began to be invited out, every night, to some of the most exclusive parties in Hollywood. “Dominick would be the center of attention, because it was Dominick to whom everyone turned to tell what was really happening in the courtroom,” Cynthia McFadden says.

“I said to him, ‘But these are the very same fucking people who turned their backs on you and wouldn’t give you the time of day. What are you doing?’” remembers Mart Crowley. “He said, ‘Believe me, I’ll never forget it, but that’s not going to stop me.’”

McFadden remembers observing him at a party hosted by Tita Cahn surrounded by Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, and Frank Sinatra. “He had come back victorious to Los Angeles,” she says.

As gratifying as it was for Dominick to reconquer the social world of Hollywood, it was nothing compared with the anguish he felt as one well-financed defendant after another wriggled off the hook. When Simpson’s not-guilty verdict was announced, Dominick’s mouth popped open in horror. His expression, captured by the courtroom cameras, became one of the indelible images of the trial.

“I was watching it live on television in a sublet apartment in the Village, and I saw the expression on my dad’s face, and I started to cry,” Griffin remembers. “Not long after that, he had a 70th-birthday party at Mortimer’s, and I remember giving a toast and saying, ‘I beg you, let this be your last murder trial.’” But there was no stopping him now. Dominick was already deeply involved in another murder case, one he would later be celebrated—and castigated—for single-handedly reopening.

At the Hôtel du Cap, in Antibes, France, 2006. Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

The origins of his involvement in the Michael Skakel murder case stretched back to 1991, when William Kennedy Smith, the 30-year-old son of John F. Kennedy’s sister Jean, was accused of raping a 29-year-old woman during an alcohol-fueled evening at his family’s house in Palm Beach. But Dominick’s complicated relationship with the Kennedys went back even further. “When I first met him,” says Dominick’s friend Fred Eberstadt, “he admired the Kennedys very much, and wanted to like them and be liked by them.” Through a friend, Dominick attended Robert F. Kennedy’s wedding to Ethel Skakel in 1950. And he later befriended Peter and Pat Kennedy Lawford, who were neighbors in Santa Monica.

Dominick was starstruck by Jack Kennedy when he saw him at the Lawfords’, but he later became disenchanted by the family’s treatment of Pat’s husband. “Peter was ill-used by his famous and glamorous brothers-in-law,” Dominick wrote in The Way We Lived Then. “Get the girls, Peter. Get the blow, Peter. Tell Sinatra we can’t come, Peter, we’re staying at Bing Crosby’s instead. Having to give that message to Sinatra was the kiss of death for Peter. Sinatra hated him from then on.” To Dominick, the Kennedys were just like his old tormentor, Frank Sinatra. They were the “careless people” F. Scott Fitzgerald had described, who “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money.”

So it should have come as no surprise when Dominick, covering William Kennedy Smith’s rape trial for Vanity Fair, sided with the accuser, Patricia Bowman. As he saw it, Bowman, being a “virtual nonentity,” was no match for the amoral tactics of “America’s most famous theatrical family.”

In the end, Kennedy Smith too was acquitted. But the trial wasn’t a total loss, from Dominick’s perspective, because while he was covering it he heard a juicy piece of gossip: William Kennedy Smith, someone told him, had been at the Greenwich home of Ethel Kennedy’s brother Rushton Skakel on the night a girl named Martha Moxley was murdered.

The rumor proved false, but it piqued Dominick’s curiosity. What ever happened to the Moxley case? In 1975, Martha, a 15-year-old neighbor of Rushton Skakel and his seven children, had been found dead under a pine tree outside her house, with the broken shaft of a Toney Penna golf club protruding from her neck. Her body had been dragged from the driveway, and a set of Toney Penna clubs was found at the Skakel house, but no one was charged with the crime.

Through a local newspaper, Dominick contacted Martha’s widowed mother, Dorthy, who had since moved to Annapolis, Maryland. “I was eager to have anybody help me who would, and he was eager for some information for his book,” Moxley recalls.

“I told Mrs. Moxley that I thought I could write another [best-selling novel] based loosely on her daughter’s murder,” Dominick later wrote in Vanity Fair,“since no facts were known publicly at the time, and it might turn a spotlight on the long-dormant case.”

Dominick wasn’t just blowing smoke; he had a proven track record for provoking controversy with his books. His first successful novel, published in 1985, was based on the famous Woodward murder case of the mid-1950s. Dominick had toyed with the idea of writing a nonfiction account, but ultimately decided that his facts were “too good to check,” as Jane Stanton Hitchcock put it. The resulting novel, The Two Mrs. Grenvilles, hit the best-seller lists and was soon adapted into a mini-series starring Claudette Colbert and Ann-Margret—to the dismay of the real-life Woodwards and their friends in high places.

Subsequent books would cause even more trouble. People Like Us, Dominick’s thinly fictionalized study of New York society, earned him some very well-known enemies even before it was published. In January 1988, five months before the release date, the editors of Women’s Wear Daily obtained a copy of the manuscript and printed a possible “who’s who” of the characters. Among those mentioned were Elizabeth Taylor, real-estate agent Alice Mason, prominent walker Jerome Zipkin, and such power couples as Oscar and Annette de la Renta, Saul and Gayfryd Steinberg, Alfred and Judith Taubman, and John and Susan Gutfreund. “Nick felt that he got shut out of a certain group at that time,” says Susan Magrino, who worked in the publicity department at Crown. “Some got over it, but some I don’t think ever spoke to him again.”

A Robert Risko cartoon drawn to accompany an excerpt from Dunne’s novel People Like Us in *V.F.’*s May 1988 issue. Illustration by Risko.

Two years later, An Inconvenient Woman arrived to offend a whole new set of drawing-room power brokers. The book was based on the tragic case of Vicki Morgan, who was murdered by her psychotic roommate in 1983. Betsy Bloomingdale, who had cut off Alfred’s payments to Morgan after his death, did not enjoy seeing this painful history served up for general consumption, and stopped speaking to Dominick. They later reconciled, she says, at Swifty Lazar’s Academy Awards party at Spago. “Everyone was looking because there he was and there I was and blah blah blah,” Bloomingdale recalls. “But I said, ‘Hello.’ And he said, ‘Hello.’ And then we were all great friends after that. A ‘hello’ could do it.”

But that was soft stuff compared with the trouble he invited with his 1993 book inspired by the murder of Martha Moxley. A Season in Purgatory was a fictional account of the killing, based on Dominick’s informed speculation about what had happened. The killer in the novel had a good deal in common with John F. Kennedy Jr., though Dominick really suspected Tommy Skakel, the second son of Rushton Skakel. Tommy, who was 17 at the time of the murder, had been fooling around with Martha that night. “I was convinced that he had done it, and had said so on TV,” Dominick later wrote.

A series of strange encounters followed, of the variety that could have happened only to Dominick. First, a mysterious woman gave him a sneak peek at the autopsy pictures of Martha Moxley’s body, which police later informed him had been stolen. She also told him, “It wasn’t Tommy.” Then a young man slipped him a copy of a secret report prepared, at Rushton Skakel’s request, by an investigative firm called Sutton Associates. The young man said the evidence pointed to Tommy’s younger brother, Michael, who was the same age as Martha. Apparently the two boys had been rivals for her affection. Finally, Dominick’s old friend Lucianne Goldberg, the literary agent, called and asked if he knew of any murder cases that her client Mark Fuhrman could investigate for his next book. Dominick didn’t necessarily admire Fuhrman, the disgraced detective in the O. J. Simpson case whose past use of the word “nigger” had provided the defense with one of its most emotionally resonant victories, but he wasn’t inclined to turn up his nose at Goldberg’s suggestion. “It was a magic moment,” Dominick later wrote. “‘The Moxley case,’ I said excitedly. ‘I have some information that I will give him.’”

Assisted—and goaded—by Dominick and Fuhrman, the Greenwich police compiled a case against Michael Skakel, who was charged with murder on January 20, 2000. The trial began in the spring of 2002, and right away Skakel’s attorney Mickey Sherman knew his client had a problem. “The jury isn’t looking at me—they’re looking at Dominick Dunne, they’re looking at Dorthy Moxley,” he remembers. “It was like arguing against apple pie.”

Dominick and Dorthy may have held the moral high ground, but the evidence was worryingly thin. The murder had occurred a quarter of a century earlier, and even Dominick had to admit that “there were no fingerprints, no witnesses, no DNA—nothing, other than circumstantial evidence, on which to build a case.” Skakel had made a series of confession-like statements over the years, but his confidants tended to be addicts and reform-school brats. Dominick was girding himself for another disappointment and enduring a bit of bullying from the Skakel and Kennedy clans. One day Michael’s aunt Ann Skakel McCooey passed by, arm in arm with Robert Kennedy Jr., and loudly called out, “Jerk!”

Then the incredible happened: after deliberating for just three days, the jury found Michael Skakel guilty. Writing in the August 2002 issue, Dominick made plain what the outcome meant to him. “The verdict in the Moxley case is the one I wanted for John Sweeney, my daughter’s killer,” he wrote. “After covering celebrity trials for Vanity Fair over the years, I have become so cynical that I simply assumed Michael Skakel would walk, as people of his class and wealth so often do.… But at the trial, justice prevailed. Here’s to you, Martha Moxley and Dominique Dunne, who got gypped out of your lives. I send you both my love.”

Robert Kennedy Jr., whose undisguised dislike of Dominick was decidedly mutual, struck back with a scathing, 16,000-word article in The Atlantic, in which he called Dominick “a driving force behind Michael Skakel’s prosecution” and generally portrayed him as a loose cannon with a vendetta against the Kennedys.

But, for those who had known Dominick since the shattering ordeal of his daughter’s murder, it was thrilling to see him vindicated at last. “Nick was at his best in the Moxley case,” says Marie Brenner. “He made it his business to get this case avenged, and he did.” At least one other journalist covering the case day in and day out thought Dominick had been in the right. “Robert F. Kennedy I think spent a total of about three hours in that courtroom and did not watch the trial,” says Jeffrey Toobin, who covered it for CNN and The New Yorker. “I thought that was revealed in his silly piece about the case.”

Dorthy Moxley, meanwhile, has nothing but gratitude for what Dominick did. “I have always said I had a team of angels helping me,” she says, “and he was a very big angel on the team. Small in stature, but he was big.”

Early in 2001, the syndicated columnist Liz Smith, one of Dominick’s closest friends, ran into Graydon Carter at a party and asked why Dominick Dunne wasn’t writing a monthly column. His life certainly was interesting enough, she said. Carter liked the idea, and in the March 2001 issue “Dominick Dunne’s Diary” made its debut. “While I do go out entirely too much,” Dominick wrote in that inaugural installment, “something always seems to happen which makes going out irresistible to me.”

With socialite Lynn Wyatt and gossip columnist Liz Smith at *V.F.’*s Oscar party in Los Angeles, 2002. By Patrick McMullan.

By that time, Dominick had long since become accustomed to trappings of success that would have seemed unthinkable when he washed up in New York in the early 80s. He had a penthouse on East 49th Street and a country house in Hadlyme, Connecticut, which Cynthia McFadden describes as “exactly the kind of house you wanted Dominick Dunne to live in, filled with books and beautiful chintzes.”

He could have retired in comfort and style, but quitting wasn’t in his DNA. It would be another year before the Moxley case wrapped up, and he’d since become embroiled in the controversy surrounding the mysterious death of Edmond Safra, an international financier who died in a fire at his apartment in Monaco. For some reason Safra’s team of bodyguards had that night off, and Dominick was convinced that the dead man’s prominent wife, Lily, knew more than she was letting on.

Not much later, Dominick inserted himself into the case of Chandra Levy, a congressional intern whose disappearance raised questions about her relationship with Representative Gary Condit. After hearing a colorful—if far-fetched—theory about her disappearance from a man who claimed to be the inspiration for the movie The Horse Whisperer, Dominick made the mistake of repeating it on Laura Ingraham’s radio show, on Larry King Live, and at dinner parties hosted by his friends Wendy Stark and Casey Ribicoff, widow of the Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff. In response, Gary Condit sued Dominick for defamation. “He just overreached,” says Liz Smith. “He thought he was more powerful than he was.” The $11 million suit, filed on December 16, 2002, did not name Vanity Fair, but Dominick nevertheless felt strongly that the magazine should finance his defense.

Dunne at Vanity Fair’s Cannes Film Festival party at the Hôtel du Cap

By Antoine Le Grand.

The fallout was unpleasant for all involved. The suit, which was later settled, “weighed heavily on him,” says Dan Abrams. “He was embarrassed that he’d gotten it wrong, and I think that’s reflective of the mentality of a real reporter.” But the sting went deeper than that. Dominick felt betrayed by the magazine that had defined him, and that he had helped define. “He really almost couldn’t bear it,” says McFadden. “It was like breaking up with a lover.”

Except the breakup never quite happened. Month after month, Dominick filed his dispatches. Month after month, his face appeared in the magazine’s pages. He covered the Robert Blake, Phil Spector, and Martha Stewart trials, the Brooke Astor elder-abuse case, and O. J. Simpson’s kidnapping trial in Las Vegas (“I don’t really think he’s guilty of this crime,” he told Brigid Berlin), all the while keeping readers up-to-date on the latest developments in his starry universe. When he patched up the long-standing feud with his brother John, he wrote about that. When John died, followed nine months later by his adopted daughter, Dominick wrote, with heartbreaking candor, about that. And when Dominick himself was diagnosed with two kinds of cancer—prostate, in 2000, and then bladder, in 2007—he wrote about that too. In all, he contributed no fewer than 67 monthly Diary entries to Vanity Fair in eight years—a remarkable feat for a man in his 70s and 80s writing for a magazine that comes out only 12 times a year.

Meanwhile, a new audience was discovering him on television. Dominick Dunne’s Power, Privilege and Justice, an original series on Court TV (which has since been renamed TruTV), introduced viewers to the biggest trials of the past half-century—including several that had punctuated Dominick’s career. The show premiered in 2002 and broadcast 57 episodes during his lifetime. New episodes were set to air this fall.

He also kept busy speaking to victims’ organizations and finishing his long-gestating last novel, which is scheduled to come out in December. Crown is billing Too Much Money as a sequel to People Like Us, and its plot concerns a rich widow whose husband died in a suspicious fire and a congressman falsely implicated in the disappearance of an intern. As usual, Dominick’s real-life inspirations are not hard to guess.

By the time work on the novel was completed, Dominick’s cancer had taken a heavy toll. He declined to have his bladder removed after doctors discovered a potentially dangerous irregular heartbeat, and instead pursued a regimen of stem-cell treatment that took him to the Dominican Republic and Germany, where—not surprisingly, given his record for remarkable coincidences—he found himself one room away from Farrah Fawcett.

He seldom complained, and he bolstered his courage with gallows humor. Fred Eberstadt remembers a call from him that began, “Hi, am I dead yet?” And Mart Crowley still laughs at the response he got after complimenting Dominick on his svelte new figure: “Well, there’s no diet like cancer!”

He spent his last days at home, welcoming a series of visitors, and Griffin took charge of making everything perfect for him. “I can’t tell you how many vases of flowers were all around him,” says Reinaldo Herrera. “He was the big star in the hospital in Hollywood in the 40s, like you saw in the movies.”

Dominick died on August 26, but fate had prepared one last humbling joke for him. The night before, Ted Kennedy had beaten him to the punch. The man who, in Dominick’s estimation, had “lived recklessly, performed brilliantly in Congress, and often failed miserably in life” was all anybody could talk about.

Even in death, Dominick was being tormented by the family he resented most. It was the kind of story that would have amused the hell out of him—if only it had happened to someone else.